You may be right about the convenience of having an existing IP with an established aesthetic, but it being set 10,000 years in the past is not a problem for me. Your assumptions are all based on a preconceived notion of forward human development. Leaving aside the fact that this is science fiction, where our “rules” don’t need to apply, societies don’t develop in a linear way. We ascribe positive, progressive, or forward development, as well as the inverse, to cultural norms, behaviors, and materiality in hindsight because of where and when we are when making the observation, but that observation cannot be a retroactive value statement on the course of development at the time.
So the fact that everything looks the same and institutions are more or less unchanged is simply a reflection of the reach of that society’s power structure and cultural influence, and as mentioned by @[email protected], the stagnation of the fictional civilization. Each society is different, and it is impossible to predict what any society will look like in the future. It may be unrecognizable or it may appear to be identical.
there is no society in human history which appears identical to the one it was 10k years ago, based on observable fact, i call your and @cowfodder’s proposition poppycock of the highest order
That’s just not the case. There are Bedouin communities and tribes of hunter gatherers whose material culture and overall aesthetic would appear (at least to the outside observer) to be more or less the same as millennia ago. That doesn’t make them any less modern than us.
But it’s probably worth pointing out, to both of us, that this is science fiction, so my attempt to apply modern anthropological reasoning is just as flawed as your assumption that things must visibly change over millennia.
You may be right about the convenience of having an existing IP with an established aesthetic, but it being set 10,000 years in the past is not a problem for me. Your assumptions are all based on a preconceived notion of forward human development. Leaving aside the fact that this is science fiction, where our “rules” don’t need to apply, societies don’t develop in a linear way. We ascribe positive, progressive, or forward development, as well as the inverse, to cultural norms, behaviors, and materiality in hindsight because of where and when we are when making the observation, but that observation cannot be a retroactive value statement on the course of development at the time.
So the fact that everything looks the same and institutions are more or less unchanged is simply a reflection of the reach of that society’s power structure and cultural influence, and as mentioned by @[email protected], the stagnation of the fictional civilization. Each society is different, and it is impossible to predict what any society will look like in the future. It may be unrecognizable or it may appear to be identical.
there is no society in human history which appears identical to the one it was 10k years ago, based on observable fact, i call your and @cowfodder’s proposition poppycock of the highest order
That’s just not the case. There are Bedouin communities and tribes of hunter gatherers whose material culture and overall aesthetic would appear (at least to the outside observer) to be more or less the same as millennia ago. That doesn’t make them any less modern than us.
But it’s probably worth pointing out, to both of us, that this is science fiction, so my attempt to apply modern anthropological reasoning is just as flawed as your assumption that things must visibly change over millennia.
poppycock. there is no more constant rule regarding every result of every action of the universe than change.